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The Science of FastFri, 08 Feb 2019 20:03:12 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.320440597Will You Be Able to Tell if NASCAR Cars are Slower in 2019?http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2019/02/08/nascar-cars-slower-2019/
http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2019/02/08/nascar-cars-slower-2019/#respondFri, 08 Feb 2019 17:45:09 +0000http://buildingspeed.org/blog/?p=4034When is the answer to better racing slower cars? It just might be for NASCAR. Note: This post analyzes the change in speed due to the new rules package. Please don’t interpret it as my defending the rules change. I won’t be making up my mind on whether this package...

]]>When is the answer to better racing slower cars? It just might be for NASCAR.

Note: This post analyzes the change in speed due to the new rules package. Please don’t interpret it as my defending the rules change. I won’t be making up my mind on whether this package ‘works’ until after Phoenix at the the very earliest. I share some of the drivers’ worries that instead of a level playing field, we’re going to get random winners. But I’m going into it with an open mind and we’ll see.

Why Slower?

For years, NASCAR has battled ‘the passing problem’. Teams have made huge gains in aerodynamic downforce over the years. These gains don’t just affect peak speed: If you have more grip, you can corner faster. Higher corner entry speeds narrow the racing groove, which makes it difficult to pass. The theory is that decreasing corner entry speeds will widen the groove and allow for more passing.

Aerodynamic downforce (Fd) depends on speed (v) squared.

The squared is important:

If you double the speed, you get four times the downforce.

Conversely (and more relevant to our purposes), to reduce the downforce by a factor of 2, you only have to reduce the speed by a factor of the square root of two (which is 1.41)

The graph below compares the mechanical grip of the car (i.e. its weight) with its aerodynamic force. The weight doesn’t change with speed, but the aerodynamic downforce does. The faster you go, the larger the fraction of your downforce that is aerodynamic.

NOTE: These numbers are for an earlier rules package, but they give you an idea of how significant aerodynamic grip is.

So Why Give the Cars More Downforce?

It seems counterintuitive that, at the same time they took away engine power, they increased the spoiler and splitter sizes. That’s because the situation is much more complex that simply total downforce. Different corners of the car experience different forces.

When turning left, the mechanical load shifts to the outer wheels and the inner wheels lose grip.

When accelerating, the rear wheels gain grip and the front wheels lose it.

When braking, the front wheels gain grip and the rear wheels lose grip.

The aerodynamic downforce depends on the attitude of the car, so when the car turns, brakes, or accelerates, the aerogrip of each wheel changes.

Proximity to another car (or a wall) near a car also changes the aerodynamic forces on the car.

Remember that the goal isn’t simply lowering speeds: It’s lowering corner entry speeds. You don’t need to slow the cars down everywhere. Also, you want the cars to have enough stability to be able to race close to each other. That’s the only way they can pass.

So NASCAR took away horsepower, but made a number of other aerodynamic tweaks. NASCAR took from the engine, but gave back a little of what they took on the body.

How Much Slower?

All some NASCAR fans heard was that they were dropping 200 hp and there was a hew and cry from some NASCAR fans that this rules package would Ruin. NASCAR. Forever.

In reality, the change in average lap speed at the affected tracks is likely to be in the 7- 12 mph range. Some people still think that’s a big deal.

But can you even tell whether a car is going 200 mph or 190 mph?

CAVEAT: Record books record average lap speeds. If you slow corner speeds, average lap speed will slow, but we don’t know how much slower the cars will be on the straightaway — if they are slower at all. Everything from here on out is dealing with average lap speed.

CAVEAT 2: As I’ve discussed before, the speeds reported are not measured. Lap times are measured and the average lap speed is calculated using the standard track length. That doesn’t account for different lines around the track. I’m using speed here because that’s what people complain about, but it would be the exact same analysis if I used lap times.

Speed vs. Time

One of the very first equations you learn in physics is the equation that relates average speed (v) to distance (x) and time (t):

The television broadcasters like to show this formula when talking about pit road speed and, much to my consternation, someone gets it wrong at least once every year. So watch for it and inundate them on twitter if they do it again this year.

It’s not like this is a difficult formula to remember. Speed is measured in miles per hour. To get a distance (in miles) from miles per hour, you have to multiply by time. Scientists call this dimensional analysis. Regular people call it common sense.

Our perception of speed is really our perception of the time it take an object to traverse a distance. Since the distance the racecars travel doesn’t change, what we’re really talking about is how we perceive time.

What is Time, Anyway?

There’s a philosophical answer to that question and a physics answer. Let’s go with the physics answer first.

The second was originally defined at 1/86,400 th of a mean solar day. (‘Mean’ meaning ‘average’, not ‘cruel’.) This was slightly less than robust, so in 1960, the world agreed that:

One second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom when the cesium atom is ata temperature of 0 Kelvin.

Believe it or not, that is actually much clearer than the first definition. But for us, it doesn’t really matter because what’s important here is how we perceive time, not the actual time.

Time vs. Time Perception

While the second is a very precisely defined quantity, your perception of it differs if you are getting married or sitting in the dentist’s chair. They may both last the same time, but it sure doesn’t seem like it. And there are people who devote their lives to trying to understand why this is.

The study of time perception requires psychology, linguistics and neuroscience. It considers time, not the objective way we measure it, but the way human beings experience it. And human beings’ experience of time is highly subjective.

If we consider only data after the track was reconfigured in 2006, you can see that the pole speed increased almost 15 mph from 2008 (182.3 mph) to 2016 (196.3 mph). The most recent pole speed (fall 2018) was 188.1 mph. The pole speed that spring was 191.489 mph.

Now let’s look at the data from the January testing sessions. There were three test sessions and 50 total runs. These are the top speeds for each car from all three sessions.

Of the 50 runs reported

22 (44%) were between 177 mph and 178 mph.

Only 5 runs (10%) were above the median speed

This leaves 22 runs (44%) below the median range.

The highest speed in a team car was Jimmie Johnson on Thursday morning, at 178.885 mph.

OUTLIER EXCLUSION: Ross Chastain reached 183.16 mph on Thursday morning, but a) that was in the heavily instrumented Chevy Wheel Force car and b) No one else got anywhere near that speed during the entire test. I’m being conservative and going with Johnson’s speed.

That’s the Clock: What About Me?

What would you see if you were sitting in the stands at LVMS?

The front straightaway at Las Vegas is about 1800 feet. How long does it take to drive that distance?

If you drove at last year’s pole speed (188.1 mph), it would take 6.524 seconds to make it all the way from Turn 4 to Turn 1.

If you drove at the top speed in the testing session (178.885 mph), it would take you 6.861 seconds.

A difference in speed of 9.236 mph corresponds to a difference in time down the frontstretch of about a third of a second (337 milliseconds). The blink of an eye takes about 300-400 milliseconds.

Will I Notice That?

Yes — because you’ll be looking for it.

Unfortunately, we can’t do the experiment because you already know the cars will be slower. Your expectations impact what you see. To really test this, we’d need to have you at a track, have a driver make laps at two different speeds and ask you which one was faster and by how much. And we’d have to do it with maybe a thousand people to get a range of opinions.

It would be like when you visit the eye doctor and do the ‘Which is clearer: 1 or 2’ thing. When we’re close, I can’t tell much of a difference. I bet you’d see the same thing with the track experiment.

In general, people aren’t very good at estimating speeds. A 2016 study from the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety (in Australia) found that drivers did a miserable job estimating how fast trains were coming when approaching railroad crossing.

That means the drivers thought they’d have 14 seconds before the train got there when, in reality, they only had 10 seconds.

The farther away the train was, the worse their speed estimates were. When the train was 1100 m (1200 yards) away and going 130 km/h (~82 mph), people estimated the train was only going 75 km/h (47 mph) – a 44% error in judgement.

The lesson here might be that if you think you just have time to scoot past a train crossing before the train gets there, you probably don’t.

A 2009 paper in the journal Vision Research found that people are also very bad at estimating the speed of a flying object, such as a ball. And there are plenty of studies that show that people have a really, really hard time interpreting the motion of accelerating objects, even if those objects are moving slowly.

The takeaway: If you’re one of those people who’s already convinced that the cars are going to be slower and it’s going to ruin your enjoyment of the sport, it’s very likely that this is exactly what is going to happen.

But Is Racing Really Just Speed?

I’d argue no. So would NASCAR, because the entire point of this speed-reduction exercise better racing at intermediate tracks.

I love the people who call into radio shows and say that NASCAR should just use a rules package that is fast and allows for close racing. Believe me, if that were possible, they’d already have done it. That’s what they’d like, too. But the laws of physics say otherwise. And the laws of physics always win.

If all you care about is how fast the cars go, you’d probably find drag racing more your, uh, speed. If you want fast stock cars, follow the folks setting land speed records — like Bob Keselowski, who shattered the all-time stock car speed record by 30 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats last September by running 271.84 mph.

NASCAR fans have been complaining about lack of passing for years. NASCAR has made a number of attempts to address it given the constraints of time and money. I guarantee you that all of this is being taken into account as they design the Gen-7 car.

For me, watching two cars run fender to fender as one tries to pass the other is the best part of racing. It’s good at Bristol at 100 mph and it’s good at Texas at 200 mph. And if I get a choice between Texas at 200 mph with minimal passing and Texas at 190 mph with more passing, I’ll take the latter, thanks.

In summary, the world is not fair. No one’s figured out a way to get high speeds and passing with the current car. Sure, you could solve the problem by throwing money at it, but that’s not a possibility in the current climate. What you see is highly influenced by what you expect to see. So I encourage you to go into Atlanta with an open mind and fingers crossed.

Thanks to @dmcgrew, who figure out I’d transposed the digits in the calculation of time and had 6.681 instead of 6.861. I can’t blame this one on Excel. I messed up typing! Thank you, Drew!

]]>http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2019/02/08/nascar-cars-slower-2019/feed/04034Johnson/Knaus: Looking Back, Going Forwardhttp://buildingspeed.org/blog/2019/01/18/johnson-knaus-looking-back-going-forward/
http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2019/01/18/johnson-knaus-looking-back-going-forward/#respondFri, 18 Jan 2019 17:50:10 +0000http://buildingspeed.org/blog/?p=3996Every new NASCAR season brings new driver/crew chief pairings, but 2019 will be first time in 17 seasons that Chad Knaus will not be on Jimmie Johnson's pit box. Let's look at why the switch was made and its likely implications.

]]>Every new Cup Season brings a new list of driver/crew chief pairings, but 2019 will be first time in 17 seasons that Chad Knaus will not be on Jimmie Johnson’s pit box. Let’s look at why the switch was made and its likely implications for the people involved and Hendrick Motorsports.

A Driver’s Career in One Graph

In 2017, I looked at driver retirement ages. It turns out that you can see a driver’s trajectory pretty well by looking at his or her cumulative win record as a function of time. Most top drivers (excluding those whose careers were cut short by accidents or surprise retirements) follow pretty much the same trend.

The slopes of the graph (the lines I’ve drawn) show you the rate at which the number of wins is increasing

We normally see:

An initial period of gearing up that might be one year or a few for a driver like Joey Logano who didn’t really get out of that phase until he went to Penske

An increase in slope as the wins accumulate at a regular frequency

An easing off, where the wins aren’t as frequent.

That plateau, I argued, in when it’s time for a driver to stop. Not the first time the driver goes without a win, but when it’s been a couple seasons and the cumulative win total isn’t increasing. (Of course, these days, the decision to retire isn’t in many drivers’ hands. There are just too many good young drivers in the wings waiting for an open seat.

In that blog, I noted one big exception to the rule: Jimmie Johnson, who had almost no start-up period and no sign of an ‘easing-off plateau’.

That was 2017.

2018 marked Johnson’s first year without a win in his entire Cup career. Until 2018, 2011 was Johnson’s “worst” year, with “only” two wins. (His best was in 2007, when he won 10 races.)

You might argue you could see a definite downturn coming if you look at a plot of just wins per year.

But Jimmie’s had declines before — look at 2011 — and he’s sprung back. No one’s ready to write off Jimmie Johnson yet.

It’s Not All About the Driver

The analogy that racing is a team sport only goes so far. In some ways, a better analogy for a NASCAR driver is as a tennis player, swimmer, or figure skater. There are the people who make fast swimsuits or better skates, but the most important relationship is the athlete and his or her coach.

Like those coaches, a NASCAR crew chief is more than a technician. He is engineer, manager, motivator, psychologist… and more.

It’s difficult to separate the role of the crew chief and the driver because there are usually a lot of variables: A crew chief change often comes with a change of teams (and/or manufacturers). There are few cases in which most of these things are held constant.

But there is definite proof that the crew chief does make a difference: Jeff Gordon. Gordon stayed with the same team and manufacturer for his whole career, which eliminates a lot of those variables. But you can divide his career into a couple different distinct slopes, some steeper than others

When I tried to figure out if there was any logic to those slopes, it turned out there was.

The Driver-Crew Chief Partnership

It’s pretty hard to deny the crew chief makes a difference. But if a driver is in a slump, one of the first things a team owner will consider is changing the crew chief. Drivers are the face of the sport: sponsors will often sign on based on the driver, so you can’t easily replace the driver. (Although most sponsors will acquiesce to change if you can get someone more likely to win.)

It’s not a question of finding ‘the best crew chief’ because that title only exists when you’re looking back at records. It’s far more important to find the right crew chief for your driver. Some drivers have gone through crew chief after crew chief in an attempt to match personalities and working styles.

If you ask team owners what they’re looking for in a crew chief, they won’t say mechanical ability. That’s a given. What’s harder to find is someone who can manage and delegate, handle a lot of things at one time, think quickly under pressure and (perhaps most importantly) communicate. An engineering degree isn’t enough and the lack of an engineering degree isn’t an automatic disqualification.

Johnson & Knaus

Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus have one of the longest, most successful driver/crew chief relationships in NASCAR history.

It’s much harder to find data on driver/crew chief pairs than on drivers by themselves or crew chiefs by themselves, but history through the lens of the partnership is interesting. Let’s look first at a list of race wins by a driver/crew chief pair.

Some of the data for this graph comes from Ryan McGee’s article on the Top-10 Driver/Crew Chief pairs. The red bars indicate currently active partnerships. Yep, I know there’s a typo in the title.

I didn’t include the team of Petty/Inman in this chart only because they were competing in a time when a driver could win 27 races in a 48-race season. Racing-reference.info‘s page on Inman says that Inman and Petty won 166 races together. (It might be more: McGee says 187.)

Johnson/Knaus also stand out if you look at number of championships won.

Some of the data for this graph comes from Ryan McGee’s article on the Top-10 Driver/Crew Chief pairs. The red bars indicate currently active partnerships.

By any measure, Johnson and Knaus enjoyed more success than any other crew-chief/driver pair competing in the modern era of NASCAR.

So What Went Wrong?

Although the announcement of the split came shortly after the team was knocked out of the playoffs this year, and there were plenty of contentious exchanges on the radio, Johnson and Knaus denied it was a knee-jerk reaction to the worst full season they’ve had together. They were just ready for a change. But it’s also true that today’s NASCAR has a higher level of competition and much less space for crew chiefs to be creative — one of Knaus’s primary strengths.

Highly competitive people hate losing. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about the Jimmie/Chad partnership has mentioned how very different the two men are. In a business where you have to prove yourself every week, if you’re winning, little else matters. If you stop winning, everything matters.

When Knaus and Johnson joined forces in 2001, they were both single young men (Johnson age 25 and Knaus 30) whose primary emphasis in life was winning races. You get older. Life happens. So let’s look at how life lines up with the data.

Johnson married in 2004, at age 29, while Knaus married in 2015, at age 44. Look how different people they were in 2013: A driver with a three-year-old and a newborn and a single type-A-plus crew chief. In 2018, Johnson had kids in school while Knaus had a newborn.

Their professional relationship changed as well: They went from novices to legends. Not being successful is much harder when you’ve been successful before. You know you can do it: you just have to figure out what to do differently.

That’s why they’ve made A Star is Born so many times.

The Experiment Begins

I haven’t kept count of how many times I’ve suggested that Hendrick break up Chad and Jimmie, just so we can see what happens. I figured they’d never do it, but I also hadn’t figured they’d have such a disappointing 2018 season. Can they be successful without each other?

In October, 2018, Hendrick Motorsports announced that Knaus would be moving to the 24 team to crew chief for William Byron. Kevin Meendering (Elliott Sadler’s Crew Chief from JR Motorsports) would join the 48 team, replacing Darian Grubb.

Will Johnson show that his driving skill is what put the pair ahead of the pack? Will Knaus show he can make a Cinderella-like transformation of a rookie driver? Or was the magic in the partnership?

After having been together since 1964, Petty and Inman split up in 1981. From 81-85, Inman guided Terry Labonte to a championship and Petty won a handful of races. They reunited in 1986, but never won another race together as crew chief/driver. Pundits like to wonder how much more they might have accomplished had they stayed together.

Knaus and Meendering

Some people questioned giving Johnson a crew chief with only three years experience at the XFINITY level, but Meendering has a 16-year history with Hendrick starting with a high-school internship. He’s a UNC-Charlotte Mechanical Engineering grad who was assistant engineer for the 24 in 2008 and became lead engineer for Dale Earnhardt, Jr.’s 88 team in 2011. JR Motorsports is a Hendrick partner, so it’s not like Meendering is stepping into a totally new environment: He knows most of the people and procedures.

It’s unfair to compare 18 years in Cup vs. 3 years in XFINITY, but that’s all we’ve got to go on, so I’m going to do it. Since you can’t compare absolute numbers, I’ve also included percentages.

While Johnson has never had another crew chief, Knaus has had other drivers, which is where the additional seasons come from.

Meedering’s percentages are better than Knaus’s (with the exception of wins), keeping in mind:

Meendering was competing in a lower-lever series with one of the better drivers in the series.

Meendering was crew chiefing a driver whose hallmark over the last five years has been not quite closing the deal.

Johnson and Byron

Again, not really fair to compare Johnson’s 18 seasons at the Cup level with Byron’s rookie season. Even comparing Johnson’s rookie year with Byron’s isn’t fair:

Byron is five years younger than Johnson was his first full-time season.

Chevy had a very steep learning curve in 2018 with their new car. Most Chevy teams underperformed.

He spent one full season in Trucks and one in XFINITY before being called up. He struggled in Cup, with only 4 top tens and 13 (36.1%) lead lap finishes.

So let’s first compare Byron’s rookie year to Chase Elliott’s rookie year. Same manufacturer (although the caveat about the new car still holds). Byron and Elliott were the same age their rookie years: 20.

Maybe a more fair (although still unfair) comparison is to look at Byron’s three full seasons in NASCAR’s top level. The reason he’s in the 24 car is because he was such a standout in Trucks and XFINITY.

Byron compares a little better to Johnson on this scale, but remember: he’s literally in a different league now.

The Future?

So what should we expect to see in 2019 from the realignment?

What Does Experience Count for in 2019

You might make the ‘old age and experience’ argument here, putting up Knaus’s twenty Cup seasons against Meendering’s three in XFINITY. But 2019 brings significant rules changes. The basics always remain the same, but every team already has the basics. Winning is about finding the little tricks that get you an extra tenth or give your driver the confidence to try a risky move that gets them a spot.

When you’re used to looking at things in one way, sometimes you miss things. When physics was making the crossover from classical physics to quantum physics, there were very smart scientists who had a hard time adapting to the new paradigm.

The same thing could happen here: We’ve seen veteran, proven drivers struggle when a major change was made to the car and we’ve seen crew chiefs whose style and approach is more suited to only car than another.

Meendering and Johnson

Listening to Meendering work with Sadler shows that he’s not one of those engineers who does well with calculators and computers, but not with people. He’s good at listening to (and managing) his driver. Johnson won’t need as much management as Sadler, but part of a crew chief’s role is cheerleading.

Meendering is 37 years old, five years younger than his new driver. They’re both long-time Hendrick veterans and are comfortable with how Hendrick operates, Steve Letarte, who worked with Meendeering from 2008-2014, has said that Meendering reminds him of Knaus, so this won’t be a big change for Johnson.

They’re hoping for the same kind of spark that Kevin Harvick had when he went to Stewart-Haas and paired up with Rodney Childers. Sometimes, that spark is all you need.

The Downside?

Taking on the job of crew chief for a high-profile driver is a risk. Just ask Steve Letarte. The pressure here won’t be as great. I initially thought that was because Johnson was coming off such a bad 2018, but it’s actually not just last year.

As I looked at the data further, I realized something interesting. For most drivers, the number of wins is the first thing to go. Many keep getting top 5s and top 10s, even if they aren’t winning. Going back over the data, that’s not the case for Johnson.

Let’s look at the number of Top 10s and Top 5s per year for Johnson.

Johnson could be counted on for 20-25 top 10s per year until 2016.

There’s a definite turndown in the number of top 5s per year as well. He had three wins in 2017, but only one other top-5 finish.

The point is that, if Meendering and Johnson aren’t successful, you can make the argument that Johnson’s downward trend is more on his driving than anything else (especially if other Hendrick drivers are successful). It’s also possible that their styles just don’t mesh — a crew chief will almost always be removed before the driver.

Knaus and Byron

Knaus’s job is to win with his new driver, but it’s actually much bigger than that. Consider what Rick Hendrick said when announcing the change:

Chad has the Rainbow Warriors pedigree and truly appreciates the history of the No. 24. I’ve asked him to build another winner and given him the green light to put his stamp on the team and do it his way.

This sounds to me like Hendrick is giving Knaus free rein to build a team about Byron the same way he built a team around Johnson: Not to turn one driver into a championship overnight, but to create a foundation on which to build for many years.

The 24 driver-crew chief relationship won’t be a partnership of equals: It will be more of a teacher-student relationship. Byron is 20 years old with one (mediocre) Cup season under his belt. He not going to question Knaus. He’s going to ask questions and absorb everything he can, but he’s probably not going to be disagreeing with how Knaus runs the team.

Knaus’s first job is getting Byron through races with his car intact.

Crashing out isn’t just demoralizing during the race. It bleeds over into the next weeks at the shop. Instead of thinking about new ideas, the team is repairing and replacing.

DNFs also means less on-track time, so less time in the seat — extra important since they can’t test. Elliott completed more than 800 more laps than Elliott did his rookie year. That’s 800 laps of experience lost.

Byron will improve this year. He’s too good a driver not to, regardless of who’s calling the shots. While I’m sure Knaus believes they can win the championship, that’s a long way to come.

The Downside?

While you might think having the best crew chief in NASCAR is a great thing for a young driver, that depends on how much patience your owner has.

If Byron doesn’t improve much, the bulk of the criticism (fairly or unfairly) is likely to land on him, simply because of Chad’s record and the perception that crew chiefs don’t age out of the job the way drivers do. A lot of young drivers are piling up in XFINITY and Trucks for lack of rides at the Cup level. If Byron were anywhere but HMS, I’d be worried for him, but Hendrick has a history of giving drivers and teams time to evolve.

But not forever.

The Institutional View

Doing this analysis got me thinking about the long term. We tend to look at these changes season-by-season and from the perspective of people involved.

But this change is really about more. It’s about the future of HMS.

Rick Hendrick has built one of the most stable teams in NASCAR history. He’s attracted and kept great talent for longer tenures than most drivers have at one company. This is a man who got rid of one of the sport’s most talented drivers because he didn’t (or refused to) fit into the company culture.

One of the problems with the lack of sponsorship is that teams are force to focus on the near future, not the long term. HMS has taken the long view. Rick Hendrick is taking step to ensure that the company is not only successful now, but continues to survive into the future. RCR has a similar approach, but with a dynastic element — which history suggests isn’t always the best choice when building empires.

If you were Rick Hendrick, with two veterans who have been astoundingly successful, but might be at the end of their careers, what do you do? Best case is that you re-assign them and one (or both) are successful with their new partners. But even if neither is the standout they were when together, you’ve got Johnson passing along his years of experience to a new Cup crew chief and a 20-year-old driver with huge potential ahead of him getting the benefit of Knaus’s experience.

Even if it isn’t a win for Johnson or Knaus, it’s a win for the company.

]]>http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2019/01/18/johnson-knaus-looking-back-going-forward/feed/03996NASCAR and Women in Motorsporthttp://buildingspeed.org/blog/2019/01/04/nascar-women-motorsport/
http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2019/01/04/nascar-women-motorsport/#respondFri, 04 Jan 2019 18:00:50 +0000http://buildingspeed.org/blog/?p=3973It’s no secret that there aren’t a lot of women in motorsports, especially at the top levels. Why? And is that a problem? The Numbers Let’s take a look at how many women there are (or aren’t) in some of the top motorsports series. I tallied up how many women...

]]>It’s no secret that there aren’t a lot of women in motorsports, especially at the top levels. Why? And is that a problem?

The Numbers

Let’s take a look at how many women there are (or aren’t) in some of the top motorsports series. I tallied up how many women were represented in the top 10, the top 20 and the entire roster of drivers who’d run at least one race that season.

My conclusion is that there are entirely too many drivers named Kelley/Kelly, Jesse/Jessie and Chris because I had to go find pictures of all these folks to tell if they were male or female. Also, the following graphs.

The number of women represented in the top 10 for the 2018 season for nine racing series.

The number of women represented in the top 20 for the 2018 season for nine racing series.

The number of women participating in the 2018 season for nine top racing series.

The last time a woman appeared in a F1 championship race was 1976. The Italian racer Lella Lombardi only completed 23 laps before a fuel system problem forced her out of the race.

Lombardi is also the only woman to be classified in the world championship points. (Sixth place finish in the shortened 1975 Spanish Grand Prix when a driver crashed into the crowd.)

Trivia

Lella Lombardi raced NASCAR: she competed in the summer Daytona race in 1977. She then switched to sports cars, where she won world championship events and finished fourth in the drivers’ world championship with co-driver Giorgio Francia in 1981. She had her best season in 1985, but became ill shortly after that and died of cancer in 1992.

NASCAR

The last woman to drive in a NASCAR Cup race was Danica Patrick in the 2018 Daytona 500.

The highest season ranking of a woman at the Cup level in the modern era was 23rd: Janet Guthrie in 1977.

The highest finish by a woman in a Cup race was 5th out of 23 (Sara Christian, the first woman driver in NASCAR history, in 1949).

In the modern era, the highest finish by a woman in a Cup-level race was Danica Patrick (6th in Atlanta, 2014)

Danica Patrick holds the record for most top-tens by a female at 7 (out of 167 races).

Danica Patrick was the first woman pole winner in NASCAR at the Cup level.

So This Isn’t Just NASCAR?

No. Many racing series have about the same numbers.

But NHRA doesn’t.

Shirley Muldowney (from Burlington, VT) won three NHRA Championships, the first in 1977.

Muldowney has a career 18 national-event wins, placing her up there with Joe Amato, Gary Scelzi and Big Daddy Don Garlits.

The first all-female national-event Top-Fuel final was in 1982 (Muldowney and Lucille Lee). There wouldn’t be another female-female Top Fuel final until 2016 (Leah Pritchett and Brittany Force).

Women in STEM

By way of background: In 1991, there were 1276 Ph.D.’s in physics awarded in the United States. About 140 of them (11%) were awarded to women and about half of those were awarded to women who were U.S. Citizens. I was one of those 70.

For most of my career, I was the only (or one of two or three) women in any room. I have a lot of ‘first woman to’ things on my resume. I spent of a lot of my career involved with trying to understand why there weren’t many women in the field and what we could do to get more women into the field. Twenty-mumble-mumble years later and we’ve made a little progress, but not much.

It looks like a big rise, but in percentages, between 2006 and today, women were static at about 18-20% of all Ph.D.’s in physics. (That number was 11% in 1991.)

Why should you care about women having access to STEM careers? Because you’re losing out on 50% of your talent base. Especially as China and India step up their STEM games, the U.S. needs our best people in the game if we’re going to stay competitive.

But What About Motorsports?

You can’t really make the same argument for motorsports. The world won’t end if NASCAR remains a male-dominated sport.

But NASCAR might end. And, believe me, NASCAR knows it.

We can argue about whether or not Danica Patrick ‘deserved’ to race at the NASCAR Cup series, but the evidence is strong that she brought new fans to the sport, most of them female and a lot of them young.

Introducing the W-Series

On November 28th, 2018, the new open-wheel “W Series” released their list of the 55 drivers who will contend for 18-20 spots in the inaugural six-round series in 2019. Every driver on that list is female.

The W-Series is F1’s plan for increasing the number of women in the top tiers of open-wheel racing by supporting a women-only racing series. Their goal is to provide a forum for women to demonstrate to team owners and potential sponsors that they’ve got what it takes to succeed.

The Goals

The Series’ CEO is Catherine Bond Muir is a lawyer and finance backer coming from the sports world who originated the idea for the W-Series while at home pregnant with her first child.

The series is funded by Scottish businessman Sean Wadsworth at an estimated $26.4 million for season one, although they plan to enlist support from sponsors to cover costs. The series pays for the cars, travel, training and races. A total $1.5 million prize fund is offered, with $500,000 going to the winner to be used to advance her career. The goal is to create a pipeline into F1 by giving women drivers an opportunity and a stage on which to prove themselves.

“…women racing drivers tend to reach a ‘glass ceiling’ at around the GP3/Formula 3 level on their learning curve, often as a result of a lack of funding rather than a lack of talent.”

David Coulthard

The Car

The W-Series will run identical Tatuus Formula 3 cars with 1.8-L, 270 hp turbocharged 4-cylinder Alfa Romeo engines. Thirty-minute races are scheduled to run in tandem with DTM (Deutsch Tourenwagen Masters), which means all six races will be in Europe and the UK. The series starts in May and ends in August at Brands Hatch in the UK.

The idea of running identical cars is to let the drivers demonstrate what they can do with equal equipment, thus eliminating variables like quality of equipment. Motorsport fans generally don’t look kindly on spec racing series, but in this case, I think it fits the goals.

The Drivers

W-Series organizers received more than 100 applications from 30 countries. The 55 drivers chosen as finalists to compete for 18-20 spots come from 26 countries.

Nationalities of the 55 finalists for the 2019 W-Series. Between 18 and 20 drivers will be chosen to compete in the first season.

The finalists range in age from 17 to 33. Their experience levels vary from former GT4 and F1600 Champions to drivers having little to no open-wheel experience beyond karting. You can view the list here.

The selection process will include on-track and simulator testing, technical engineering tests, fitness trials and such. The selected drivers will be mentored by

former F1 driver David Coulthard

Adrian Newey (the most successful F1 designer in history)

Dave Ryan (a team manager with teams like McLaren and Manor, as well as his own GT racing team)

Matt Bishop (a communications/PR specialist)

It’s important to note that this isn’t an F1 initiative. The W-Series will likely be sanctioned through the British Racing & Sports Car Club, but they are in touch with the FIA.

Is This is a Good Idea?

The Pro

Many of the women who have signed on to the W-Series see it as one more opportunity. There’s little to risk for someone like Decker or Gannis.

For others, this might be their last chance. Alice Powell was the first woman to win a Formula Renault championship and the first woman to score points in the GP3 Series. She won five races and finished second in the GP3 championship standings in 2013. And then…

Nothing. For lack of money to move up. Her response to the W-Series came via twitter.

I see both sides of points… but funding is the thing. I haven’t raced for 4 years because of no funding. I just want to race.

Alice Powell

The Con

Some believe that an all-female series suggests that women can’t compete with men on a level playing field. Toto Wolff, the Mercedes F1 executive director, said formats like Series W ‘undermine’ women in the sport.

An all-women championship is giving up on the mission of eventually making girls compete on a high level and against the boys in Formula One. It is undermining what girls are able to achieve.

Driver Pippa Mann was even more vehement in her opposition to the idea.

She argues that there are already women competing in mainstream series who are struggling for sponsorship, and that the money invested in the W-Series would be much better used to support those women.

Lyn St. James (the first woman to win the Indy 500 Rookie of the Year award in 1992 who still holds many land-speed and closed-course speed records) was at first dubious, then came out in opposition to the idea.

Do we need an all-women series? No. Do we need opportunities for women in racing? Yes. It is a male-dominated sport; it is a sport where women need to learn to compete equally with men.

“Do we need an all-women’s series? I don’t think so. Not at all… If you want to start a new series, that’s great. But put half men and half women in it and give some of the guys a shot that wouldn’t get one otherwise.”

Is A ‘W-Series’ the Answer for NASCAR?

If someone had a spare couple of tens of millions of dollars around, why wouldn’t they spend it on an established team? Or an up-and-coming female driver who’s proven herself to have potential?

The idea of female-only racing series hasn’t worked in the past and there’s little to suggest it might work now.

The W-Series got 100 applications and they were drawing from the entire world. A number of their 55 choices are a questionable IMO — including one driver who has never won a race and claims women aren’t capable of racing against men.

Don Panoz started the Women’s Global GT sports car racing series in 1999 to support ALMS races. Very similar in concept to the W-Series, it folded after one year due to the high costs.

It reinforces the idea that women aren’t capable of racing men.

It doesn’t take advantage of everything we know about helping women break into male-dominated fields.

Critical Mass

Critical mass is a term that comes from nuclear weapons physics: it’s the minimum amount of fissile material you need to maintain a nuclear chain reaction. That chain reaction is what makes nuclear weapons possible.

But it’s come to be used by the people who study representation because we’ve learned that there’s a particular level (generally around 15-25%) below which nothing changes. Danica Patrick was hailed as the woman who was going to open up NASCAR to other women by blazing a trail.

It doesn’t work like that. Yes, role models are important, but they’re not the only thing you need. Researchers have studied everything from Navy ships to corporate boardrooms to STEM disciplines. Change happens when you get to critical mass.

Can NASCAR Reach Critical Mass?

NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity program has come a long way since its start in 2004, but they have six drivers (usually 1-2 of whom are women) per year. Kyle Larson, Bubba Wallace and Daniel Suárez are graduates of that program, but the majority of the drivers don’t make it: Some learn they don’t have the talent or drive. Others have stalled out for lack of funding. At this rate, though, there’s no way to make critical mass.

I’d suggest you’ll never reach critical mass with drivers, but it’s possible to make situation improve by getting more women in technical and racing-related positions in NASCAR. With due respect to the communications and PR specialists, many of whom are women, they live in a different world.

There are women in technical jobs. Lisa Smokestad, an HMS tire specialist and Alba Colon, an engineer now also with HMS, but previously with Chevrolet Racing spring immediately to mind. More recently, we have lead engineers Angela Ashmore and Andrea Muller. But the numbers are growing very slowly. They aren’t a lot of women among NASCAR officials or the R&D Center, either.

What To Do Instead

Study NHRA

NASCAR has sent executives to other racing series to study how they do things in an attempt to come up with new ideas. Perhaps they should think about sending a delegation to NHRA. Talk to the racers and talk to the fans. What are they doing that NASCAR isn’t?

Unfortunately, I think part of the answer to that question is that John Force had four daughters.

Seriously.

If they didn’t make critical mass, they were at least close to it. He had the resources to support their interest in racing and no one in NHRA was going to mess with John Force’s kids. So maybe one thing to do is to look toward the next generation of NASCAR kids: Audrey Larson, Piper Harvick, the Kenseth girls, Molly and Taylor Hamlin, Karsyn Elledge, and, of course, Isla Rose Earnhardt.

The Importance of Family

As I looked up the 55 women on the W-Series list, I noticed something really interesting. With very few exceptions every one of them got into racing because her father raced, wrenched, or had wanted to race.

We see the same thing in STEM fields. Women who succeed almost always mention the importance of parents who supported their goals (even if the parents had never been interested in (or liked) science. You cannot over-emphasize the impact on your kids when you tell them they can do something — or that they can’t.

And even if they don’t end up driving professionally, they’ll likely be fans for life.

Start Earlier

Susie Wolff (the wife of the Mercedes Executive I quote above) was a development and reserve driver for F1 team Williams. She retired in 2015 when she realized she wasn’t going to get a full-time seat. She’s putting her energies into encouraging more girls to get into karting, where they currently make up about 3% of participants in the UK.

In Conclusion

There are no easy answers, but everything we know about representation suggests that segregating women in their own series is unlikely to even be a hard answer.

]]>http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2019/01/04/nascar-women-motorsport/feed/03973NASCAR 2018: The Year in Charts and Graphshttp://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/12/21/nascar-2018-year-charts-graphs/
http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/12/21/nascar-2018-year-charts-graphs/#respondFri, 21 Dec 2018 17:36:16 +0000http://buildingspeed.org/blog/?p=3935This is the time of the year when everyone takes one final look back at the last year before turning to think about the new one. So, in this last blog of the year, I thought I'd summarize the season in charts and graphs.

]]>This is the time of the year when everyone takes one final look back at the last year before turning to think about the new one. So, in this last blog of the year, I thought I’d summarize the season in charts and graphs.

Where and When We Raced

If we consider the top-three NASCAR series.

NASCAR ran 92 points-paying races in 2018

36 Cup Races

33 Xfinity Races

23 Truck Races

In 2018, we

Were scheduled to run 13,979miles (10279 laps) worth of races

We actually ran 13,741 miles (10,250 laps).

Thank you, weather.

Where We Raced

The star denotes Canadian Tire Motorsport Park in Bowmanville, ON. For some reason, the only way Excel lets you show Canada is if you include the entire Western Hemisphere.

NASCAR visited 23 states (46%) and one province.

Florida and Virginia hosted the most races: 8 each

Ontario (Canada) and Wisconsin hosted the smallest number of races: 1 each.

Although NASCAR is national, it’s base is still strongly in the Southeast

38 races (41%) were run in the Southeast

14 races (15%) were run in the Southwest

14 races (15%) were run in the Midwest

6 races (6.5%) were run in Texas

If we look at Cup races only:

NASCAR ran its customary 36 points-paying Cup races in 2018 in 20 of the 50 states (40%)

Virginia hosted the most races of any state with 4

Florida hosted the next-most races with 3

The Cup Series’ base is also still clearly the southeast.

16 races (44%) were in the SouthEast

6 races (17%) were in the West.

4 races (10%) were in the Midwest

2 races (5%) were in Texas

A Quick Flashback

I went back to look at where we raced 20 and 40 years ago. I put all of the graphs on the same color scale, which runs now from 1 to 6 because there were six races in North Carolina in 1978.

Note also that the number of races changed in that time from 30 to 36 as well.

When We Raced

Only 3 races were moved due to weather this year, which meant 8% of our races ended up being on Monday.

Three-quarters of the races were run on Sunday — and all three Monday races were scheduled for Sunday, which means that the original schedule was for 83% Sunday races. That leave 17% Saturday races.

While it sometimes seems like there are more and more night races, they actually only make up 22% of all Cup races

You can see the distinction if we look at start times, too, because Saturday races are all night races.

28 races (77%) started in the afternoon.

19 races (53%) started between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m.

12 races (1/3) started between 2:00 and 2:30 p.m.

The Races

29 drivers completed all 36 races. Unsurprisingly, they were the top 29 drivers in the end-of-season rankings. You already know who has the most wins (Harvick and KyBu tied with 8 each), so let’s look at some lesser known stats.

Margins of Victory

In 2018, only one race (first Michigan) ended under caution. The margin of victory for the other 36 races varied a bit.

The average margin of victory was 2.1 seconds, but that’s heavily skewed by runaway victories at

Fontana (Truex, Jr.)

Sonoma (Truex, Jr.: when he was good, he was very, very good…)

Watkins Glen (Chase Elliott)

first Dover (Harvick).

Those four races were each won by more than 7 seconds.

However, 50% of the races were won by 1 second or less, and 88% of the races that ended under green were won by 4 seconds or less.

1 race (2.7%) ended under caution

4 (11%) races were won by 0.2 seconds or less

10 (28%) races were won by 0.5 seconds or less

The smallest margin of victory was second Talladega (0.105 seconds)

The largest margin of victory was Truex, Jr. at Fontana (11.685 seconds)

Flashback to 1998 Again

In 1998, the average margin of victory was about the same (2.0 seconds), but…

There were 33 races

5 races (15%) ended under caution

The smallest margin of victory was 0.051 seconds (Jeff Burton at Richmond)

The largest margin of victory was 13.117 seconds (Dale Jarrett at Dover, of all places. There were only four cars on the lead lap at the end of the race.)

13 races (39%) were won by 1 second or less

7 races (21%) were won by 0.5 seconds or less

4 races (12%) were won by 0.2 seconds or less

If we make a histogram for 1998…

It’s really not so different from 2018, it it?

What About 1978?

I was going to give you an average for 1978, but I can’t because a number of those races don’t actually have time differences, they have lap differences. While Rockingham was won by 1.3 seconds, Martinsville was won by 3+ laps.

Every year, we’re going to have at least one, and probably two or three (or four) races every year where someone runs away with it. It’s the nature of sports.

Pole Speeds

I suppressed the zero on this graph because it made it easier to see the differences.

Qualifying was rained out three times.

The high and low pole speeds of the season happened in two consecutive races.

Cautions

The largest number of cautions in a race was spring Bristol (13) followed by fall Vegas (12)

The smallest number of cautions in a race was 3, which we saw at Sonoma, fall Richmond, and fall Kansas. In each of those races, two cautions were for stage ends, so they really only had one unplanned caution each.

Lead Changes

We saw 550 lead changes this season, but the number per race was pretty spread out.

The smallest number of lead changes (7) was at Darlington

The largest number of lead changes (25) was at

Daytona in July and

Talladega in the spring.

Daytona (February), Atlanta and Chicagoland had 24 lead changes each.

Plate tracks tend to have more lead changes, but this year, fall Talladega only had 15 lead changes.

The average number of lead changes per race is 15.3.

Penalties

I did a whole blog on penalties up to the 34th race, but let’s add those last two in, just for the sake of being complete…

The teams of Michael McDowell, Daniel Suárez and J.J Yeley should probably set their warning lights a little further from pit road speed next year.

McDowell had 19 penalties, 13 of those being speeding on pit road.

Suárez had 16 penalties, 9 being speeding on pit road.

Yeley had 10 penalties, 7 of them for speeding on pit road.

The least penalized full-time driver was Kurt Busch with 4 penalties

Laps Run

Out of 10250 laps,

Ryan Newman completed the most laps (10,077 or 98.31%)

Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. completed one less lap (10, 076 or 98.30%)

I put red boxes by our final four. There’s no obvious correlation between being in the final four and laps run.

Harvick was the lowest of the final four (9691 laps or 94.55%)

Kyle Busch was the highest of the final four (10,001 or 97.57%)

Even Michael McDowell, who completed the smallest number of laps of any full-time driver, ran 87.4% of all the laps in all the races, which comes out to 8964 laps.

Laps Led

Completing laps is good: Leading them is better.

Here, there is a very clear correlation with finishing position. There’s our final four in the first four spots.

Harvick led 19.4% of all laps run

Kyle Busch led 14.33% of all laps run

Truex, Jr. led 9.91% of all laps run

Logano led 9.11% of all laps run

However, you will notice that the champion is number four on the list! So there’s no correlation with the final four finishing positions.

All the full-time drivers led at least one lap with the exception of poor David Ragan (who is one of the nicest people on Earth).

The top four drivers led 52.77% of all laps run.

The remaining 25 drivers led 42.3% of the remaining laps

Part-time drivers lead 0.48% of the laps run.

Lead Lap Finishes

Lead Lap finishes provides a better sense of discrimination, which is a good thing in statistics. Some numbers don’t vary too much, which means them don’t tell you a lot between the highest driver on the list and the lowest driver on the list.

I didn’t show you the graph for running at finish because it just wasn’t that interesting. There was one interesting thing: William Byron was off track at the end of 25% of the races, which is lot more than even the next lowest (DiBenedetto and Wallace 19.5%.

Well, here’s a stat that varies a lot from highest to lowest: In what percentage of the races did the driver finish on the lead lap?

Again, you see that our top four are right up there in the top four positions. Kyle Busch finished on the lead lap in all but 5 races But look at the range. Bubba Wallace and Matt DiBenedetto only finished 6 races on the lead lap.

Thank You!

Thanks for following along in 2018. I wish everyone a happy, healthy 2019.

]]>http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/12/21/nascar-2018-year-charts-graphs/feed/03935Cautions are Down in 2018: Are NASCAR Drivers Getting Better at Avoiding Accidents?http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/12/07/nascar-cautions-fewer-accidents/
http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/12/07/nascar-cautions-fewer-accidents/#commentsFri, 07 Dec 2018 17:27:32 +0000http://buildingspeed.org/blog/?p=3906NASCAR Cautions are down again in 2018. Is this due to stage racing? The damaged vehicle policy? Or are drivers just getting better and having fewer accidents?

]]>Cautions are down this year — again. And that’s despite adding around 70 cautions per season when stage racing was instituted in 2017.

That same year, NASCAR introduced the damaged vehicle policy: If you can’t get your car back on track and at minimum speed in five minutes on pit road, you’re done for the day. This rule made the penalty for getting involved in accidents a whole lot higher.

So it’s natural to wonder if the reason accidents are down is because drivers are being more careful.

The State of Cautions in 2018

Recall the panic after Martinsville at the start of the year. Cautions were running low at a rate that hadn’t been seen since 1999.

I’ve been through the reasons why comparing absolute numbers of cautions is wrong before. — especially since there were only 34 races in 1999 and the first six races weren’t always run at the same tracks. It makes a difference if Bristol is one of the first six tracks or not.

What you really want to compare are the number of cautions per 100 miles, which I’m going to call the C-Index. If the C-index is two, it means there are (on average) two cautions per 100 miles. A 500-mile race would have (on average) ten cautions.

Note: I suppressed the zero (meaning that it starts at ‘1’) on the vertical axis to show the variation better.

If you’re wondering, Race #8 was Bristol. The caution rate didn’t really level off until the very end of the season. Here’s the season-end C-Index for the last 18 years:

The lesson is not to make predictions after six races. 2018 didn’t end up being the season with the lowest number of cautions. 2012 still holds that distinction. This year was actually pretty similar to 2010. Yes, 2018 was low, but not abnormally so. We’ll get to why that is in a moment.

Five Years of Cautions: In Detail

I did a detailed analysis of cautions for the last five years, which gives us three years before the stage racing/damaged vehicle policy and two years after. Let’s first look at a graph of total cautions for that time period.

What’s interesting here is that NASCAR added 2 stage-end cautions per race when they introduced stage racing. That’s 72 additional cautions, although there have been cases in which accidents ended a stage, so the number varies a little.

So we added 70-something stage-end cautions, but the total number of cautions went down. Did these policies change the way drivers comport themselves on the track?

Breaking Down Cautions

In order to answer that question, we have to look at the origin of the cautions. Let’s look at 2018 first.

The largest causes of cautions in 2018 were

Accidents (45%) – 111

Stage end cautions (29%) — 71

Spins (10%) – 24

Debris cautions (5%) – 13

Let’s compare that 2014:

There were, indeed, more accidents, but look at how many debris cautions there were!

Accidents (49%) – 150

Debris (27%) – 81

Spins (10%) – 30

Oil/Fluid (5%) – 17

Let’s look at the change over the five years in a couple categories.

Accidents

Here are the numbers for just those cautions NASCAR attributes to accidents:

There was a small increase from 2016 – 2017 and a pretty significant decrease (57!) this year.

Spins are basically one-car accidents, right? So I thought perhaps I should include spins in the graph.

Accidents for which drivers can be held responsible were definitely down in 2018 after being pretty doggone consistent for the last four years. But if we’re interested in the impacts of stage racing and the damaged vehicle policy, we’re interested in changes from 2016-2017. And there wasn’t a big change. This tells us that the institution of stage racing and the damaged vehicle policy didn’t make drivers any less likely to have accidents.

Why Fewer Accidents in 2018?

Can we explain the smaller number of accidents this year? I think we can. I analyzed which cars were involved in accidents (My analysis didn’t include spins, but I’ll do that in another blog.) Here are the cars that were involved in the most accidents in 2017.

NOTE: Let’s not confuse being involved in an accident and causing an accident. The stats don’t place blame. Sometimes it’s just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two of the prime offenders (Patrick and Earnhardt, Jr.) aren’t racing in 2018

Almirola, in the 10-car, was only involved in 9 accidents in 2018

Bowman, in the 88, had 12 accidents in 2018

Trevor Bayne only ran 21 races in 2018. The 6-car had 10 accidents in 2018, 9 of which were with Bayne behind the wheel

Kahne moved to the 95 in 2018 and was only involved in 6 accidents.

Although accidents are down significantly in 2018, I don’t think it has anything to do with stage racing or the damaged vehicle policy.

What about Debris?

Here are the debris cautions for 2014 – 2018:

This is pretty interesting. The number of debris cautions decreased over 2014-2016 pretty steadily. This is like due to changes in rules for how the car is constructed.

But there’s a huge drop off in 2017 — right when the damaged vehicle policy was instituted. We see a decrease in cautions due to oil and fluid on the track over time as well, although it’s not as pronounced.

If we combine the two…

Keeping damaged cars from going back on track after an accident and causing more cautions was the primary reason for the damaged vehicle policy.

This graph suggests it’s working.

Counting stage-end caution laps

Many people (including drivers) have complained about counting the stage-end caution laps as part of the overall race lap count. Even doing that, the average percent of races run under caution has gone down. In 2014, 15.7% of the races were run under caution. This year, we’re down to 13.6% cautions.

In 2014, 15.7% of the laps were run under caution.

In 2018, only 13.6% of the laps were run cautions.

So even counting the stage-end laps, NASCAR fans are getting more green-flag laps in 2018 than they have in the last five years.

]]>http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/12/07/nascar-cautions-fewer-accidents/feed/13906NASCAR’s Final Four’s Performance on 1.5-Mile Trackshttp://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/11/16/final-four-1-5-mile-tracks/
http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/11/16/final-four-1-5-mile-tracks/#respondFri, 16 Nov 2018 15:00:12 +0000http://buildingspeed.org/blog/?p=3877A lot of sites have overall statistics about the championship contenders for the season, or their performance at Homestead. Given that the final race is at a 1.5-mile track, it’s worth looking at how the final four contenders for the NASCAR championship have performed at 1.5-mile tracks. I was surprised...

]]>A lot of sites have overall statistics about the championship contenders for the season, or their performance at Homestead. Given that the final race is at a 1.5-mile track, it’s worth looking at how the final four contenders for the NASCAR championship have performed at 1.5-mile tracks.

I was surprised (and pleased) to realize that we’ve only run 10 mile-and-a-half tracks this year. Surprised because everyone is always complaining about how many 1.5-mile tracks we run and pleased because, boy, it makes calculating percentages really, easy.

2018’s 1.5-Mile Tracks

We visited three tracks twice and four tracks once (now that the return to Charlotte has become a road course). Let’s look at how each driver did at these tracks by plotting their finishes all on the same scale and same chart. I’ve inverted the scale, so that the longer the bar is going down, the worse the finish.

The Final Four vs. The Field

Since 1.5 mile tracks make up 30% of the tracks we run, making it to the final four means that you have to be at least decent at intermediate tracks. The final four are.

Final Four vs. Each Other

But, of course, the final four aren’t competing against the field at Homestead: They’re competing against each other. So let’s look at their individual records.

Final Four Records at 1.5-Mile Tracks

A couple things stand out immediately, notably that Harvick is either very good or he crashes early. But out of three DNFs this year, two came at 1.5-mile tracks, and his last three races have been his three worst (if you take into account the penalties from Texas, which I think you should.)

Truex, Jr. has one bad (> 30th) finish at 1.5-mile tracks, while Logano’s worst finish is 22nd and Busch’s worst finish is 17th.

Here’s another way of looking at the history. The symbol shows the average finish for the 10 tracks and the line goes from the worst finish to the best. If the symbol were halfway between the worst and the best, it would mean the driver was equally likely to finish above or below the average. These are all closer to the best finishes

High, Low and Average Finishes at 1.5-Mile Tracks

You can see Harvick and Truex’s variability in the length of the lines associated with them. Looking at average finishes at 1.5 Mile tracks in 2018:

Busch has an average finish of 5.2 and the smallest spread in finishes

Truex, Jr. has an average finish of 7.2 and a worst finish of 37th

Logano has an average finish of 7.7, but a worst finish of only 22nd

Harvick has an average finish of 10.5 and, as noted before, the worst finish of any of the final four.

Below, I’ve put wins in green, 2nd-5th place finishes in yellow and 6th-10th-place finishes in red. (I haven’t included finishes outside the top 10 on this graph.)

Wins, Top-5s and Top-10s at 1.5-Mile Tracks

Harvick’s got one more win over Busch, but fewer top 10s. Truex only has one win at a 1.5-mile track this year, while Logano has none.

What about situations in which a driver has the best car and doesn’t win the race? Laps led may augment our understanding of how well the final four drivers generally do at 1.5-mile tracks.

Laps Led on 1.5-Mile Tracks

We’ve run 3003 laps at 1.5-mile tracks. That’s about 4500 miles. Of those laps:

Busch has led 19% of all laps run at 1.5-mile tracks.

Havick has led 29%

Truex, Jr. has led 9.7%

Logano has led 8.3%

Of all four drivers, only Busch has run all those laps. Logano has run all but one. Truex and Harvick (as might be guessed from the low finishes) have run fewer laps (2749 and 2561 laps respectively). Let’s look at the fraction of laps the drivers have led compared to the number they’ve run.

% Laps Led Out of Laps Run

If you look at it this way, Harvick looks a lot stronger than Busch. When he’s on the track, he’s led 34% of the laps he’s run, whereas Busch has only led 19%. Of course, we all know that the only lap that matters is the last one.

Driver Ratings at 1.5-mile Tracks

Here’s a high/lo/average plot of driver rating for only the 1.5-mile tracks. Harvick wins this one as well, with Busch 2nd, Truex, Jr. 3rd and Logano 4th.

Beating Each Other

But you don’t have to win to win the Championship, so how have the drivers done racing against each other?

How Many Times Each Driver Has Beaten the Other Three on 1.5-Mile Tracks

As much as I love Logano’s optimism and belief that he’s the leading contender, he hasn’t topped all three of these drivers at any 1.5-mile track this year. That’s not to say he hasn’t bested them elsewhere, though.

How Many Times Each Driver Has Beaten the Other Three on All Tracks vs. 1.5-Mile Tracks

Busch is just as likely to beat you at a 1.5-mile track as he is at any other track, whereas Logano is much more likely to beat you anywhere other than a 1.5-mile track.

So It’s Pretty Clear Which One of Them Will Win, Right?

Well, of course not.

Because the final race isn’t a culmination of anything. It’s a single race. Logano crashed out on Lap 95 last week and finished 37th out of 39 cars. All you need is a late penalty, someone else’s crash or a slow pit stop and the entire complexion of the race changes.

And there’s also the possibility that none of the four win. As noted earlier, Harvick’s last three races have been his three worst at 1.5-mile tracks. Busch had trouble at Texas. As a group, the final four have been less impressive in the last nine races than they have been in the main part of the season.

The Wild Card

All three of the cars that were taken back to the R&D Center after Texas were found to have spoiler-related violations. Rodney Childers commented that a lot of people seemed to have found something to improve their runs at 1.5-Mile tracks. We don’t know who else was running something they may not take a chance on bringing to the track this week. We don’t now how long the spoiler modifications have been going on.

]]>Your driver is running in the top five when he gets caught speeding on pit road. While early penalties can sometimes be overcome, late penalties can eliminate any chance to win.

In most competitive sports, from baseball to chess, the more experience you have, the less likely you are to make mistakes. Can we say the same thing about NASCAR?

An Overview of 2018 Penalties

With 34 races complete, NASCAR has assessed 376 in-race penalties in 19 categories to 56 drivers. No one in the top 20 has made it through the season without at least one penalty.

But some drivers are making more of a contribution to the total than others. As usual, my data is from racing-reference.info.

Comparing Apples to Apples

Not all drivers run the same number of races. We can’t really compare the driver who gets two penalties in two races to the driver who gets two penalties in two races.

Part-time drivers ran a total of 275 races while full-time drivers ran a total of 1018 races. So the part-time drivers ran 21% of all and the full-time driers account for 79% of all races. This would suggest that part-time drivers should be responsible for 21% of all the penalties.

Part-time drivers were responsible for 109 penalties, while full-time drivers were responsible for 267 penalties.

Part-time drivers

Accounted for 21% of the races

Committed 29% of the infractions

Had a penalty per race average of 0.4

Full-time drivers

Accounted for 79% of the races

Committed 71% of the infractions (267)

Had a penalty per race average of 0.26

Part-time drivers, on average are more likely to be penalized than full-time drivers.

Which Full-Time Driver Has the Most Penalties (So Far)?

The graph below shows total number of penalties for the 29 full-time drivers competing this year. I’ve highlighted the top four drivers in red and the next four drivers (the ones who are still in the running) in green.

Side note #1: I was curious whether 29 is a low number of full-time drivers. It’s on the lower end of the ten past years, but not anomalously. It’s difficult to count because you’ve got a number of drivers who meant to be full time, but missed races due to injury or suspension.

My working theory was the the drivers with the most number of penalties would be those with the least experience. So this result made me go back and double check that I hadn’t done something squirrely with the data.

Right up at number one is not only a very experienced driver, but last year’s champion: Martin Truex, Jr. with 17 in-race penalties.

There goes my theory, right?

Side Note #2: Did the Furniture Row team closing announcement have anything to do with the large number of penalties? Four penalties were from the races after the of them. They had two penalties at Daytona in February and 5 at Bristol in the spring.

There were 4 penalties in the 9 races after the announcement (0.44 penalties per race)

There were 13 penalties in the 25 races before the announcement (0.52 penalties per race)

All Penalties are Not Created Equally

NASCAR levied 19 different types of penalties — but not all of them can be blamed on the driver.

We could quibble about some of the non-driver attributable penalties. Removing equipment, for example, could be driver’s fault or could be the pit crew’s fault. I erred on the side of only blaming the driver for things we could be pretty sure he or she was responsible for.

Considering all drivers:

51.6 of the penalties were non-driver attributable

48.4% of the penalties were driver attributable

Considering only full-time drivers

51.7 of the penalties were non-driver attributable

48.3% of the penalties were driver attributable

So, about the same fraction regardless of which group of drivers we consider. Wondering what exactly those penalties were? Here’s a breakdown of the driver-blameable infractions:

Too fast entering pit road and too fast existing pit road together account for 79% of all driver penalties. We see something similar when we look at the non-driver penalties:

Tire violation, too many men over the wall and crew member over the wall too soon (all of which are pretty hard to blame on the driver) combine to account for 84% of the crew-attributable infractions.

These distributions remain pretty much the same if you only consider full-time drivers with the following note: No full-time driver got ticked for going above the blend line exiting pit road, passing the caution car, or jumping the restart.

Breaking Out the Blame

So if the driver is only responsible for about half of the total violations, that would mean Martin Truex, Jr. was only responsible for eight or nine of the 17 violations, right?

Here’s the same chart as before, but I’ve put the driver-attributable penalties in yellow and the non-driver-attributable penalties in green.

MTJ is not responsible for seven violations. He’s only directly responsible for three. His pit crew got caught five times with too many men over the wall at Bristol in the spring. They had seven penalties in the first eight races – one more than the had in the next 17 races.

So Penalties Really Do Correlate with Experience?

Although all these drivers were full-time this year, they weren’t always full time. To get an equal measure of experience, I divided the total number of cup races each driver has won by the number of seasons. This gives us a ‘equivalent years of experience’ I thought would be a fair measure. So let’s plot penalties vs. driver years of experience.

This is pretty much random, signifying that there’s no correlation between experience and penalties; however, I did use the total number of penalties and we’ve seen from the MTJ case that this isn’t really fair to the driver. So let’s plot driver-only penalties and look for some patterns.

Hmm… absolutely no correlation here, either. It’s always good to go back the original data, so let’s see if there are any patterns in the data if we just plot the number of driver penalties for the full-time drivers.

Again, the top four drivers are in red, the second four are in green. Now a pattern begins to emerge. The top drivers are all in the four-or-less portion of this graph. That includes Erik Jones, with 2.0 effective years and Chase Elliott with 3.1 effective years, as well as Harvick (17.9 effective years) and Kurt Busch (also 17.9 effective years)

At the same time, the most penalized drivers included Suárez (1.9 effective years) and Wallace (1.1 effective years), but also Newman (17.1 effective years) and Jimmie Johnson (17.0 effective years). So experience is not the relevant variable here.

Then What Is the Relevant Variable?

I plotted out a number of possibilities until I happened to look at the raw data in a table and saw the correlation that way

This is the strongest correlation I found. If you exclude the first two drivers, the number of penalties is most closely correlated to their ranking in the driver standings. Kyle Busch (4) and MTJ (3) are 1st and 2nd and have more penalties than the 3-6th drivers, which suggests perhaps that they take more chances: they get caught more often, but it seems to pay off because their rankings are the two best.

Does this mean that worse drivers make more mistakes? Or that making mistakes pulls them down in the standings? Hard to tell from this data.

Just out of curiosity, I plotted total penalties vs. standings.

And found no correlation there, either. Consistent with the driver’s behavior not necessarily being represented by the total penalty numbers.

What About Crew Penalties?

MTJ’s wasn’t responsible for 14 out of the 17 penalties. What about the other teams?

The 78 team had twice the number of non-driver attributable penalties than the next highest teams (The 17 and the 20 tied at 7 penalties each.) But plotting the data this way doesn’t take into account the total number of penalties because there are cases in which the driver made the lion’s share of the mistakes.

So here’s another way of looking at the numbers. I plotted the ratio of driver mistakes to non-driver mistakes. If the ratio is one (which I’ve indicated with a red line), it means that the driver and the crew made the same number of mistakes.

If the number is greater than one, the driver is contributing more than his share. Those bars are above the red line. If the number is less than one, the crew is making more mistakes than the driver. Those are the bar below the red line.

David Ragan was penalized 7 times (all for pit-row speeding) while his crew only had one penalty (for not meeting minimum speed). On the other end, Kyle Larson only had one driver-attributable penalty and six crew-leaning penalties.

But this still doesn’t give us all the information in one graph, so we need to move to graphs that can handle 3D data. Like Bubble Graphs.

This graph plots the number of driver penalties vs. non-driver penalties with the size of the bubble proportional to the total number of penalties. The red line represents a 1:1 ratio: the driver and the crew made the same number of mistakes. Below the line means that the driver made more mistakes, while above the line means that the crew made more mistakes. You can see more clearly that the drivers who made the most mistakes tend to be the lower-ranked drivers.

]]>How do you decide who the ‘best’ driver is? Is it the guy who wins the most races? Or the guy who runs up front the most? If it’s s combination, how do you weight each factor? And once you’ve decided that, how do you structure the playoffs to ensure that’s who actually wins?

NASCAR has modified their playoffs with the intent of creating a balance between winning and consistency. Have they succeeded?

Birth and Evolution of The Playoffs

The NASCAR championship points system has undergone 15 changes since 1949 (or so Wikipedia tells me.) Five of those changes have occurred since the institution of a playoff-type system in 2004.

Each iteration tried to make individual races more exciting by rewarding winning, but without diminishing the importance of consistency. You don’t want your champion to have ten wins and twenty-six finishes out of the top 30, right? On the other hand, you also don’t want drivers feeling like they have to play it safe so they have a “good points day”.

Has NASCAR Always Rewarded Winning?

In 2003, Matt Kenseth won one race and the championship. Ryan Newman won eight races, but seven DNFs left him in sixth place at the end of the year. But Kenseth’s championship wasn’t all that unusual.

The blue bars below show the number of wins the champion had each year from 1991 to 2017. The red bar appears only if someone other than the champion won the most races that year.

The green asterisks signify cases in which multiple drivers had the same number of wins as the champion. In addition to the 2003 season:

In 1992, Alan Kulwicki won the Championship with two wins; Bill Elliott and Davey Allison each had five wins and finished second and third, respectively.

Two of the three drivers who got into the playoffs with a single win at a restrictor plate track are out.

Dillon and Jones are out

Logano is still in.

The one driver who got into the playoffs with a single win at a road course (Blaney, and the Charlotte Road Course) is out.

But Brad Keselowski has three wins and he’s also out. So how can you say the playoff system rewards wins when Logano, Kurt Busch and Almirola are in with one win and Keselowski is out?

I initially thought that this was a nasty consequence of the three-race elimination format, which I admit to having mixed feelings about. All you need is a mechanical failure or someone else wrecking you and you’re in jeopardy. Granted, Keselowski didn’t have a great three races (finishes of 14th, 27th and 6th), but he didn’t experience any mechanical failures or crashes, either.

So is his eliminate really reflective of how he’s run this year relative to other drivers?

Keselowski’s Year at a Glance

If we extend our graph to include top-5 finishes, Keselowski still looks like he should be in the round of eight. I’ve colored wins red and finishes in places 2-5 orangey.

He’s not up there with the “Big Three”, but Keselowski looked like he was a contender when he racked up three wins in a row, two before the playoffs started and one after. Unfortunately, that span is the highlight of an otherwise uneven season.

The graph below shows his finishes for all races thus far. Longer bars are worse finishes. And there are a lot of longer bars.

Just to give you an idea of how that compares to someone else’s year, let’s look at the same graph for Kyle Busch

You can really see the difference in terms of number of short bars. While Kyle Busch has three finishes out of the top 30, Keselowski has seven — the most out of any of the top 16.

And if we look at finishes out of the top-20, Keselowski has the most (9) out of anyone who made it into the Round of 12. Dillon (11), Johnson (10) and Bowman (8) were all eliminated in the last round of cuts.

It’s Not Just Top 5’s and 10’s…

I’ve shown you a couple times (including a blog on the average age of the starting field at Daytona) that getting a complete picture of anything requires that you look at more than a single number or two. Distributions give us a much better picture than a simple number like an average, or the number of top-5s or wins.

A graph with a single peak would mean that the driver finishes in that range every race. A graph with a flat distribution would mean that the driver is equally likely to finish in those positions in a race.

A histogram shows the distribution of finishes in each range from 1 to 40. Here’s the histogram for Keselowski. He has three wins, seven finishes between 2-5, nine between 6-10, etc.

You can see the peak in the histogram — the most likely outcome of a race for him this year — is around 6-10 mark, with the peak size going down on either side.

However, there’s a pretty big peak at the far right. About 19% of all Keselowski’s finishes were in the top 5, but almost 16% of his finishes were between 31 and 35. Almost 25% of Keselowski’s finishes were out of the top 25.

We can compare Keselowski’s histogram with other drivers we are in the round of eight. I’ve plotted all the histograms on the same scale for easy comparison. They all show the same number of races: what’s different is the distribution of finishes. Here’s the Histogram for Joey Logano.

While Logano’s histogram peaks in the 6-10th place, he has 14 finishes in that range, whereas Keselowski has 9.

If you look at the weight on the left side, they’re actually about equal: Both drivers have the same number of top 5s, although Logano has 1 win and Keselowski three.

81% of Logano’s finishes were Top 15, whereas only 65% of Keselowski’s finishes were Top 15.

The really big difference is to the right of the peak.

Less than 10% of Logano’s finishes were outside the top 25,Keselowski has 25% of his finishes outside the top 25.

Here’s the Histogram for Almirola, who currently sits at 8th.

You can see that the peak is again in the 6-10 range, but Almirola has more weight toward the right side: almost as many 11-15 finishes as 6-10. Only 7% of his finishes are outside the top 25, but there’s a very large peak in the 21-25: 25% of Almirola’s finishes are outside the top 20. You can see from these distributions how these drivers compare. (I’m rooting for Almirola, but I don’t give him a strong chance of making to the Round of 4)

The Leaders

A histogram helps us look at the top four as well. Here’s Kyle Busch’s histogram:

The block at the right side are the three DNFs he had this year. He’s got one win in each of the 11-30 bins, but everything else is in the first three bins. Only 4% of Kyle’s finishes are outside the top 25. Compare with Kevin Harvick’s:

This looks very similar to Kyle Busch’s on the left side, but there’s a little more weight to the right. 12.5% of Harvick’s finishes are outside the top 25.

Martin Truex, Jr.’s is quite odd. As I noted earlier, he has no 6-10th place wins.

He’s got a lot more wins in the 11-30 range than the first two drivers. 16% of his wins are outside the top 25, including 5 DNFs. His consistency in getting top-5 finishes, even if they aren’t wins, offsets his lower-place finishes.

I almost forgot about Chase, but here is his data:

You can see that Elliott has a much broader range of finishes. The weight is much more equally spread over the first five bins. About 15% of his finishes are outside the top 25. Let’s circle around and compare Elliott to Keselowski.

They both have three wins, but Elliott peaks more to the left (higher finishes) than Keselowski.

Finally, we can put all this information for all 16 drivers on a single graph.

You see why I went through the individual graphs first, right? I’ve used a ROYGBIV + grey and black color scheme, showing wins in red at the bottom, followed by 2nd to 5th-place finishes in orange, 6th-10th-place finishes in yellow, etc. I ran out of rainbow and used grey and black at the end.

What does a champion look like on this graph?

Lots of red: A champion has to win races

The top-10s (red + orange) are more than 50% of the races (the Big Three)

The top-15s (red + orange + yellow) are more than 50% of the races. This is true for Kyle Busch, Harvick, Truex, Jr., Elliott, Logano, Kurt Busch, Keselowski, Hamlin and Jones

Outside the top-25 finishes (both purples, grey and black) are small. This is what killed Keselowski and (along with lack of wins) Johnson.

Conclusion

I think this analysis shows that NASCAR has actually balanced consistency and winning much better than many people (including me) thought. If you look at the entirety of a driver’s finishes, it shows that having a few wins can be offset by a lot of bad finishes. Drivers with lots of wins can afford a few bad finishes, but drivers without a lot of wins can’t.

Bonus Playoffs Data

As long as I had to go to all the work to pull this data together, I thought I’d look at some other things I found.

What Happened to Johnson and Larson?

Chase Elliott has been the bright spot for Chevy this year. The histograms for Larson and Johnson show the situation.

Johnson’s peak is in the 6-10 range, with almost nothing to the left. Johnson only finished in the top-5 6.25% of the time. He only had 12.5% of finishes outside the top 25, which is the same as Harvick; however, Johnson doesn’t have the wins and top-5s to offset those low finishes.

If Larson would’ve had a few wins, he’s be a strong competitor. The bulk of his finishes are in the 2-5 range and only 12.5% of his finishes are out of the top 25. But there’s a long tail on the right side of the distribution and nothing to offset it. If he’d won the two races he finished second in, you’d be looking at a very different outcome.

Leading the Most Laps Isn’t That Important

Havick has led a lot more laps than anyone else (1682 vs. 1231 for Kyle Busch and 970 for Truex, Jr. — but it didn’t put him in first place. Some of that is problem in the pits or accidents, but with stage points, it’s more important to be leading particular laps, even if you don’t lead the majority of them.

But here’s something interesting. I’ve compared the percentage of laps led in the regular season to % laps led in the first six races of the playoffs.

Harvick has led 30% of the laps during the playoffs, compared to about 18% during the normal season.

DNFs Do Not Matter — up to a point

The top five drivers have 3, 4, 5, 4 and 5 DNFs. They have enough high finishes to offset those.

The drivers at the bottom of the group of eight have the fewest DNFs: they have to, because they don’t have enough high finishes to compensate.

]]>NASCAR announced the 2019 rules package last week. Reactions from fans ranged from wait-and-see to despair to a surprising amount of anger.

The 2019 package is similar to the package was tested at the 2018 All-Star Race, but different in some very important ways. It further specializes the standard set up for different types of tracks. The larger spoiler and splitter and the underbody changes will be required at all tracks. Other changes (the tapered spacers and the aeroducts) will be different at different tracks.

So how much is really changing?

Tapered Spacers Aren’t New

A 1.170″ tapered spacer was introduced in 2015, reducing engine horsepower from about 850 hp to 725 hp. (Note that teams did quickly find ways to increase the horsepower a little, despite the new rules.)

That same spacer that was introduced in 2015 remains one of two spacers that will be used in 2019. You’ll also note that the spoiler goes back to its 2014 height and the driver-adjustable track bar that was introduced in 2015 is being taken away.

Which Rules at Which Race?

The Daytona 500 will be the only race that will use a restrictor plate.

A 1.170″ tapered spacer will be used at all tracks less than 1.33 miles and will (still) result in about 725 hp* overall engine power.

A 0.922″ tapered spacer will be used at all oval tracks 1.33 miles and above. which will decrease engine horsepower to about 550 hp*.

At five of those larger tracks (both Pocono races, Darlington, Atlanta and Homestead), the aero ducts won’t be used.

Aero ducts will be used at the rest of them.

*Note: NASCAR regulates the spacer/restrictor plate, not the horsepower.

Since different horsepower means different mileage, NASCAR will require teams to block part of the fuel cell so that the number of laps run between full fuel runs should be the same.

Let’s see if we can’t make this clearer with a graphic.

You may wonder about my choice in how I listed the tracks. They’re listed in order of most recent pole speeds for each track. Most pole speeds came from 2018, but some qualifying sessions were rained out, so I went to 2017 and, in one case, 2016.

I put Sonoma at 2.52 miles because they’re changing it for next year, even though the pole speed was for the shorter track.

Tracks with the 1.170″ tapered spacer and no aero ducts have pole speeds ~160 mph and below

Track with the 0.922 tapered spacer and no aero ducts have pole speeds 173-184 mph

Tracks with the 0.922 tapered spacer and aero ducts have pole speeds 185 mph and up.

Chicagoland looks like an exception, but the pole speed there this year was anomalously low, so I understand why they put it with the last group of tracks.

Lemma: Doesn’t Pole Speed Scale with Track Size?

Sort of. In the graph below, the three configurations are represented by the same colors as I gave them in the table above. You could make an argument that speed is somewhat linear for the short tracks. (I did use five or six speeds for each track and they’re pretty consistent.)

But our 1.5-mile tracks range from 173 mph to 201 mph, and the superspeedways are already artificially restricted.

Tapered Spacer vs. Restrictor Plate

The All-Star Race package used restrictor plates to throttle the engine back to around 400 horsepower. Most fans liked the All-Star Race, but a few drivers (notably Brad Keselowski) objected, saying that the pack racing that resulted put less control in the drivers’ hands.

It’s hard to compare All-Star Race data because they change the rules every year. Some years require a pit stop during qualifying. However, in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017 (2016 was rained out), the pole speed was between 144 mph and 147 mph. The pole speed for last year’s All-Star race was 127.644 mph.

How Plates/Spacers Work

A restrictor plate (or the tapered spacer) slows cars down by preventing them from bring air into the engine as quickly as without the plate or spacer. Remember that aerodynamic forces go like the square of the speed: double the speed and you quadruple the force.

When cars are so dependent on aerodynamics, however, it’s hard to pass. Lower speeds, along with the aero ducts creating bigger wakes behind the car is theorized to improve passing.

The Chemistry of Fast

Combustion is the chemical reaction between fuel and oxygen that releases energy. It’s very similar to another chemical process called respiration, which is how your body converts food to energy.

For example, to combust two octane molecules, you need 25 oxygen molecules. Not 24, not 26, but exactly 25.

So if reduce how many air molecules you have in the cylinder, you have to reduce how much gas you put in the cylinder. Otherwise, you’re just wasting gas.

But tapered spacers and restrictor plates work differently when you get down to the details. Below, on the left is a restrictor plate. It is 1/8″ thick and really nothing more than a plate with four holes on it. On the right is a tapered spacer, which is on the order of an inch thick. It also has four holes, but the holes are conical.

In fluid or aero-dynamics terms, the restrictor plate is a set of orifices, while the tapered spacer is a set of nozzles.

Both fit over the spot where the carburetor used to be.

Some Differences

There are a couple minor differences between these two parts. Restrictor plates are stamped: A big die comes down and punches out the hole, leaving a bit of a chamfer on the side the air enters and a bit of a burr on the side the air leaves. This significantly affects the way the air travels into the engine. One engine builder told me that the four outer cylinders get about ten times less air than the central four cylinders with restrictor plates. Tapered spacers, on the other hand, are machined parts and provide for much more even distribution of air.

Because the restrictor plate is so thin, any imperfection makes a big difference. A scratch can mean more horsepower. Tapered spacers are much less sensitive.

The Big Difference

While the distinction between the two seems minuscule, air molecules see two very different things. The next two graphics show the airflow through an orifice and a nozzle. The air comes in from the left.

The animation I took these clips from shows the motion, but you can still see that there’s much more turbulence with an orifice than a nozzle. Some of the arrows to the right of the orifice point away from the orifice, while others point toward the orifice. The flow lines are messier, also.

Compare that to the nozzle (below). See how much cleaner the flow lines are? And all the arrows point away from the nozzle. There is much less turbulence with a nozzle than with an orifice — meaning that the tapered spacer provides air to the engine in a very different way than a restrictor plate does.

When an air molecule passes through an orifice, it essentially has to take a right-angle turn. The flow of the air makes the effective diameter of the orifice smaller than the actual hole diameter.

The walls of the tapered spacer NASCAR uses are machined to be at a 7 degree angle. That’s the maximum angle at which air can travel without separating from the surface. This minimizes turbulence.

Simulations are useful, but there is nothing like being able to see fluid flow. Luckily for us, air and water are both fluids and a five-gallon water bottle provides the perfect illustration of the differences between a tapered spacer and a restrictor plate.

A hole — the same size as the hole at the top — is cut into the bottom of the five-gallon jug. The hole in the bottom is like a restrictor plate and the top is like a tapered spacer.

Now watch how the water empties differently.

Why is NASCAR Reducing Horsepower?

NASCAR is all about speed, but high speeds mean high dependence on aerodynamics (difficulty passing) and requires harder, stiffer tires (less opportunity to engineer fall-off into the tire).

More Tire Falloff.

When I talked with Goodyear’s Greg Stucker, he noted that race length doesn’t really factor into tire design because a tire only has to last for a fuel run. That forces teams to change tires (or chance not changing tires).

Corner entry speeds have become so high that Goodyear has to make relatively hard tires — which means they don’t wear as quickly. Lower corner entry speeds will allow Goodyear to go to softer compounds and different constructions. That will allow for more strategy.

The Future of the NASCAR Engine

Formula E, in its sixth season, has eleven manufacturers. The overwhelming interest in what is currently a niche series can be attributes to manufacturers looking to remain relevant in the future.

NASCAR’s been very clear that the eight-cylinder eight-hundred+ horsepower engine is a barrier to entrance for other manufacturers because it’s so far removed from current production cars.

“it gives us the option to be more relevant. It gives us that option to look at new technology in the future and our current package doesn’t do that.

So why not just mandate a new engine and not worry about tapered spacers? Change costs money and takes time. There are parts inventories to be considered, especially as teams struggle for sponsorship. There’s an additional issue for engine companies because NASCAR is requiring engines to be used for multiple races. That means fewer engines built.

NASCAR is the proverbial aircraft carrier trying to turn. The inertia is huge.

Aerodynamics and Passing

Every engineer I’ve consulted says that their simulations tell us to expect pack racing at most of the 1.5 mile tracks next year. They expect drivers will need to be full-on the throttle around the track, although that may not be the case with less-banked corners and/or if tires have a lot of fall off.

Pack racing gives you passing, but it’s a different kind of passing. If the inside line passes the outside line on the frontstretch, then the outside line passes the inside line on the backstretch, that seems to me to be a wash.

So Will It Work?

Most drivers are taking a wait-and-see approach to the new package. Even Kyle Busch has been restrained in his remarks after the new package was announced. Everyone agrees that NASCAR is trying to improve the racing, even if they don’t agree with the precise way they’re doing it.

The aerodynamic changes and the horsepower changes together are a pretty big change. There’s a test with the new package at Charlotte on October 23rd. We’ll see what happens, both on the track, and with driver reactions.

And there’s still time for changes. Goodyear can tweak tires and teams have time to experiment with different set ups. It’s all part of progress. You try things and you see if they work. This is the nature of research.

I’m along with Joey Logano on the change for the moment:

“You make change, and not every change is good, but you learn from every change. If you just sit still, you never make any progress forward. You don’t learn what’s wrong, you don’t learn what’s right, you’re just there…

we will learn from this decision one way or the other, and I think as a society we need to be open to do that, not just in our sport, but in life. It’s a good thing for us. It’s healthy.”

]]>http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/10/12/2019-rules-package-tapered-spacer/feed/03780The Roval is Just a Really Fast Road Coursehttp://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/09/28/the-roval-is-just-a-really-fast-road-course/
http://buildingspeed.org/blog/2018/09/28/the-roval-is-just-a-really-fast-road-course/#respondFri, 28 Sep 2018 18:30:00 +0000http://buildingspeed.org/blog/?p=3735This weekend marks the very first time NASCAR has run a race on the Charlotte Roval: a combination of the oval track we run in May with select portions of the road course in the infield. It's a unique situation because, unlike most road courses, this one is contained. Fans will be able to see the entire course. Everyone is looking forward to seeing something new on this one-of-a-kind hybrid track.

]]>The Charlotte Roval is being talked up as a hybrid track unlike anything NASCAR has ever run before. It’s the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of tracks. I have no doubt that this weekend’s races will be exciting race, but I suspect that is more because it is a new track than because it’s a Roval.

I’m not knocking the Roval. It’s a brilliant way to introduce a new track without building a whole new track. (Although Marcus Smith admits that the cost runs into the millions of dollars.) Perhaps the best thing about the Roval is that fans will be able to see the entire course. It’s the perfect road course for NASCAR.

You would think that a hybrid course would require Goodyear to create a hybrid tire that can handle the 24-degree high-speed oval turns, and the tight twists and turns of the road course. But the tire being used this weekend is a straight road course tire.

It almost didn’t turn out that way. Greg Stucker, Goodyear’s director of racing, and I went through the history of the Roval and the unique needs of road course tires to trace the path from concept to the tire you’ll see on the track this weekend.

Tire Taxonomy

While we fans tend to divide tracks up by how they look (i.e. Superspeedways, short tracks, intermediate tracks…), Goodyear engineers look at tracks a little differently.

The essence of designing a racing tire is Grip vs. Wear.

Like most things in the world, designing a tire is all about compromise. You want a soft, grippy tire? Fine, but a slightly harder tire that doesn’t have quite as much grip will last longer.

Goodyear optimizes tires for each track. Whereas we group tracks by length, Goodyear takes a different tact. They are interested in the forces acting on the tire (in the direction the tire is traveling, (a.k.a. laterally) and perpendicular to the direction of travel); the nature of the surface (rough vs. smooth; asphalt vs. concrete) and the ranges of speed and acceleration.

Goodyear divides up their tracks into seven Venue Groups. Here’s how Goodyear divided up the tracks this year.

Goodyear venue groupings for 2018

Because Goodyear considers so many different factors, venue groupings change. For example, here are the venue groupings for 2009.

Goodyear venue grouping for 2009

Road Course vs. Ovals

Most NASCAR fans know that tires for oval tracks have stagger. Because the car only turns left, the right-side tires are a smidge bigger than the left-side tires, which makes the car naturally turn left. And, obviously, if you’re turning left and right, it doesn’t make sense to use a multi-zone tire.

But there are some other important differences that impact tire construction for road courses vs. ovals.

Speed

Ovals have higher speed and run over a much narrower range of speeds over the course of a lap.

Speeds aren’t as high on road courses, but they span a much greater range.

Acceleration/Deceleration

Ovals don’t require much acceleration/deceleration. There isn’t any sharp braking or acceleration.

Road courses, on the other had, feature much higher accelerations and decelerations.

Forces (which are proportional to acceleration).

Oval tracks produce high sustained forces.

Road courses feature high transient forces. Compare the force you feel jamming on the brakes to stop vs. taking an exit ramp from the expressway.

Turn Radius

All of the turns in an oval track are similar. Even the variations at a place like Darlington are minimal

Road courses have much sharper turns, including 90- and 180-degree turns.

Minimum Recommended Inflation Pressures

An oval-track features a left/right split to optimize turning left.

A road-course car features a front/back split to optimize acceleration and braking.

Here are the differences in minimum recommended inflation pressures for the Charlotte oval (red) and roval (green).

I was iffy about whether that graph is clear, so here’s a more literal presentation of the same data:

In terms of tire construction, road course tires have much stiffer sidewalls to stand up to hard braking and acceleration, and sharp turns.

Inner Liners. Also note that inner liners (the tire-within-a-tire that allows the driver to maintain some control over steering in case of a blowout) are not used in road-course tires.

The History of the Roval Tire

Greg Stucker has been with Goodyear for 39 years. When I asked him how many brand-new tracks he’d been involved with designing tires for, he said “Not that many, really.” He points out that a track may be new to a series, but that doesn’t mean it’s new to Goodyear.

Goodyear has been involved with racing for over a century, with their experience spanning all different types of racing. When NASCAR started going to Indianapolis, Goodyear had experience with the track from IndyCar. But the Roval is truly a new track.

“Landing on the proper tire set-up for the Charlotte road course has proven to be a challenge,” Stucker said. In talking with him, it was clear it was a challenge he and his team enjoyed meeting.

Timeline

Marcus Smith said on Nate Ryan’s NASCAR on NBC podcast that he came up with the idea of running a hybrid course three years ago. His initial proposal included three variations on a potential road course/oval circuit. He was pushing for a Roval race in Fall 2017, but the decision was made to push the date to this fall to allow adequate preparation time.

Stucker told me that Goodyear first heard about Roval plans toward the end of 2016, which meant they needed to plan a strategy for developing a brand-new tire.

In January 2017, A.J. Allmendinger ran laps using Watkins Glen tires on the 2.4 mile Charlotte road course/oval. Although Goodyear had experience with sports cars on the Charlotte road course, this was their first chance to look at a stock car on the course and gather some preliminary data on the ranges of speed, accelerations and forces the tire would be required to handle.

A lot of work happens behind the scenes before the first tire test. Goodyear works closely with teams and the manufacturers on simulations. Goodyear knows tires, but they don’t have the experience of the teams in terms of set ups. Goodyear provides tire parameters and the teams run those parameters through their simulation programs, then report back to Goodyear what kinds of setups they might choose for those tires. Goodyear feeds that information back into their development. It’s an iterative process: as Goodyear refines the range of tire parameters, the teams refine their setups.

There are two parts to a tire: the tread package and the carcass. Goodyear compounders — the people who develop the tread compound, can mix up a range of compounds and study their properties on the small scale. The carcass for a new tire starts with an existing tire and is modified as data is acquired.

Once the parameters for an actual test tire are determined, Goodyear will test the tires in-house on a tire-testing rig. The rig shown below isn’t the Goodyear rig: It’s a similar system at the National Tire Research Center in Alton, VA. The tire is spun against a belt and rotated to simulate the angles the tire would make on an actual track.

Like an engine dyno or a seven-post rig, you can program the tire’s movements, so you can test a tire against data from a specific track, for example. The wheel is outfitted with sensors to record tire forces and moments. That data is also fed into simulations and models.

The first tire test was in October 2017. Kurt Busch, Martin Truex, Jr., Jamie McMurray and Daniel Hemric drove the 2.42 mile road course, reaching top speeds of about 175 mph.

They started out with Watkins Glen tires, but those were a little too hard for the slow corners in the infield. They worked their way through alternate tires with softer compounds, looking for the ‘just right’ tires that would balance durability and grip. Goodyear came out of that test feeling “pretty good” about the tire that emerged as the leading contender.

But, as the great philosopher Heraclitus tells us…

All is change

Heraclitus

The drivers (Busch in particular) felt that the twisty, windy part (that would be the section from turn 6 to turn 10 in the diagram above) presented a problem: The cars were very slow through that area. So those turns were removed to yield the course we’re using this weekend.

This diagram was from back when the race was to have been 500 kilometers. The length was subsequently shortened to 400 km, which is about 250 miles.

Looking at the course, you’ll notice that they run almost the entire 1.5 miles of the oval, which means there’s about a eight or nine-tenth of a mile of road course. So why use a road course tire when the majority of the track is a mile-and-a-half oval?

It’s because drivers won’t be driving the oval part of the track the way they’d be driving it if they were just driving the oval. Remember that Goodyear designs tires based on speed, wear and loads. Coming out of the new turn 8, cars will be going very slowly. It will take some time to accelerate to speed. It looks like most cars are maxing out at about 170 mph on the backstretch.

If the only change had been eliminating the turns, the cars would’ve been running all out from turn 2 all the way down the backstretch and back to the entrance to the road-course portion of the turn.

Two chicanes were added, one on the backstretch (11-12) and one on the frontstretch (15-17). Those will slow down the cars a lot. Brendan Gaughan said this morning that the cars will go from maybe 150 mph to 50 mph going through that frontstrech chicane.

Stucker said that those changes made a huge difference to their development efforts because the narrowed the window of speeds the tire had to handle.

A Little Lemma* on Chicanes

*A lemma is a sidenote in a proof, not a small furry animal that has gotten an undeserved reputation for blindly running over cliffs.

A chicane is an S-shaped curve in a road added strictly for the purpose of slowing down traffic. They are used on public roads and racetracks to enhance safety and (on the racetrack, at least) are ideal places for passing.

A Bus stop is just a type of chicane.

The interesting part of the story is how the Bus Stop chicane got its name. It apparently comes from the Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium. The location of the chicane, which was added to slow down cars on the back straightaway, was an actual bus stop back when the track was a public road.

Back to the Story

The next tire test was in March 2018, and it was the first on the new configuration. Bad weather cut the test short and it had to be completed in May. Stucker says that the base tire they started with (the ‘control tire’ against which the other tires are compared) was good, but that they thought they might try a slightly softer compound to give drivers a little more grip.

Chaos and Chunking

That slightly grippier tire was the one they used for the first open test in July. Half the teams ran on the 10th and the other half a week later. That first test was the one that generated lots of stories with the words ‘chaos’ and ‘chunking’ in the headlines. A number of drivers had issues in Turn 3. Additional rumble strips and barriers were added.

The description of tires ‘chunking’ was new to me. We’re familiar with things like excessive wear (cording) and excessive heat in the tread (blistering). Chunking sounds like whole pieces of the tire are coming off, but it’s actually just pieces of tread coming off due to failure at the interface between the tread and the rest of the tire.

Stucker attributed the chunking to two things and one of those two things might also have contributed to the ‘chaos’ issue:

Goodyear wanted to try to give the drivers a little more grip and offered them a softer tire. Softer tires build up more heat.

Speed also creates more heat. Stucker notes that the drivers were also getting more comfortable with the course, which meant they were driving harder and faster as they gained confidence. So what worked ideally back in March/May turned out to be a problem in July.

The solution was simple: go back to the slightly harder tire, which was what some teams used during the July 17th test and is what everyone is using this weekend. So the tires that you heard about failing during the tests aren’t the tires they’re actually using.

Building the Tires

When I visited the Goodyear racing tire factory last month after the Michigan race, they were making the tires for this weekend. About 250 Goodyear employees hand-make 700-800 racing tires a day. One of the workers assembled a tire before our eyes. It took him about 10-15 minutes, but I bet it goes a lot faster when he doesn’t have to explain what he’s doing to a group of people who ask a lot of questions.

In case you’re thinking of blaming me if there’s a tire incident this weekend, don’t. We went through each step of Goodyear’s extensive quality control process. Every tire is thoroughly inspected visually, with light, and with x-rays. Anything that doesn’t look perfect gets pulled. The people who make these tires prides themselves on a quality product and know how much is (literally and figuratively) riding on their tires.

Goodyear tire building Rob Ford performs a visual inspection of a cured race tire before the tire is stenciled with ‘Goodyear Eagle’.

The Day Arrives

I have a lot of friends whose research involves launching satellites and rockets. They said the worst part of the job was after the rocket launched because everything was out of their hands. They had done the best they could and now they had to wait.

Each weekend, Goodyear has teams of engineers systematically monitoring Pit Road. They collect information about wear, pressures, and temperatures from the teams and look for anything unusual. I asked Stucker if they would do anything differently this weekend given the brand-new tire. He laughed and said “We’re not planning on it.” But, he said, they were going to keep their “eyes wide open”.

So much of the use of the tires is out of Goodyear’s hands. The teams have a lot of leeway in terms of setting the car up. An aggressive set up that wears tires unevenly can lead to failures. One of the other things Goodyear is keeping an eye on right now is cuts and nicks that come from tires hitting the sharp edges of some of the curbing.

The Goodyear executives alternate travel weeks. Stu Grant, the General Manage of Global Race Tires will be the on-site lead at Charlotte, which means Stucker will be watching the race from home. But, he said, his phone will be in his hand the whole time.

Thanks to Greg Stucker for the interview and to Mike Siberini for setting everything up.